No Escape

You want to get away. From your home or your town. Or from your job, your relationships, or from all the old knee-jerk habits. Or from your shape, your face, your fears and dislikes, your squanderings, your losses, your hesitancy or impulsiveness. Or from your blindness, your perseverations, your gaping hole, your wound, your life.

But every way out ends up taking you right back to where you are.

You realize there is nowhere else to get to. No matter how far you run away, you are there, riven. No matter how far you run away, it is your town, the town of your dissatisfaction, incompletion, and vague, helpless, pained bewilderment.

Now the phone is ringing. It is ringing. It will not stop.

Whether you pick it up or not, you will answer it.

Without settling for an easy conclusion – anger, despair, resignation – without a hair’s breadth of separation from this dilemma, fully seeing it through and seeing through it,

what to do when nothing will do?